Fire, ambulance, police and other emergency services in many different forms have existed in society for all recorded history. Traffic control has also existed in some form for the same period. In today's environment, as traffic levels increase, it is imperative that those responsible for providing for the safety and security services to our society have access to the best methods and systems available. Using these methods and systems, they will be able to assist emergency response personnel and vehicles in getting to the scene of an accident, fire, crime or other natural or man made incident or disaster as quickly as possible.
Over the years routing of emergency vehicles and people has taken many forms. Most of the original forms of routing were procedural in nature, specifying routes with least traffic or congestion based on historical traffic patterns based on day of week and time of day. With the advent of the 2-way radio and its use in emergency response vehicles, more real time routing was available provided that input from traffic control points was being supplier to dispatch facilities. Over time, with the increase use of networks and devices used in traffic control, video monitors at major intersections were added to the input devices available to the dispatcher to permit direct real-time observation data as well as direct control of the traffic control signal switches at major intersection points.
Many rental cars and trucks, today are equipped with a GPS driven, computer based guidance system. These systems utilize GPS and sophisticated routing software to direct the driver, using a synthesized voice, to their destination. The system uses GPS tracking or some other suitable location monitoring and tracking system to know its current location. The driver enters an address of the desired destination and the system, using maps and sophisticated routing software, computes the fastest, shortest or most direct route based on the drivers preference. Once activated, the system will tell the driver what to do every step of the way. In addition, if the driver makes a wrong turn, the system will perform a real time re-route process and give corrective routing directions to the driver to get him back on course.
While this type of system is quite advanced and useful, it lacks the ability to get real time traffic updates from a traffic control network. Furthermore, the prior art systems are costly and in-effective.
The present invention is aimed at one or more of the problems identified above.